Do Firms R&amp;D Collaborations with the Science System and Enterprise Group Partners Stimulate Their Product and Process Innovations?

Samuel Amponsah Odei,Jan Stejskal

doi:10.3390/economies7020043

Abstract

There is a growing consensus that knowledge drives firms’ process and product innovations. An important source of these innovations is from firms networking with R&D partners, such as those in the science system and other industries in the enterprise group. This paper aimed to examine firms’ innovation collaborations with science systems and enterprise group partners and how these influence their product and process innovations. We focused on firms in the manufacturing sectors in the Czech Republic and Hungary. For our empirical analysis, we used the truncated data from the Eurostat Community Innovation Survey (CIS) 2012–2014, and the binary logistic regression model. Our results have demonstrated that firms’ collaborations with these actors have a discernible positive influence on their product innovations. Conversely, the collaborations with these R&D partners for process innovations produced mixed results for both countries.

Highlights

In recent decades, there is a paradigm shift from conducting innovations in isolation to the collaborative innovation models where firms cooperate and depend on other research and development (R&D) partners for their knowledge and innovations
The explanatory powers of our binomial logistic models range between 2% and 47%, and the low levels of the model’s predictive powers indicate that the possibilities of these innovation collaborations in the two countries are at lower levels
The results show that firms’ product innovations are positively associated with their R&D collaborations

Summary

Introduction

There is a paradigm shift from conducting innovations in isolation to the collaborative innovation models where firms cooperate and depend on other R&D partners for their knowledge and innovations. Most of these empirical studies focused on countries classified as innovation leaders and those with strong innovation potential, such as the United Kingdom, Denmark, France, Germany, and Sweden among others (Banal-Estañol et al 2015; Kergroach et al 2018; Liu et al 2019). These studies demonstrated that these R&D collaborations are noticeable in these innovation leaders and strong innovative countries, but they differ significantly and Economies 2019, 7, 43; doi:10.3390/economies7020043 www.mdpi.com/journal/economies

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